Illustrated Transcript

Narration: Ever since Europeans arrived in Australasia, nature, has been on the run.

Red deer, are just one of thousands of introduced species that have infested New Zealand.

And every year, in Australia - the cycle of natural disasters, continues.

It's as if the land, is spiralling out of control.

In Sydney harbour, tall ships gathered to celebrate the bi-centenary of the arrival of the British, in 1788.

Ever since, wave after wave of migrants, from around the world - have made Australia, and New Zealand - their home.

Tim FlanneryAuthor of 'The Future Eaters'

Flannery: "It's easy to imagine that us Australasians have really made a secure future for ourselves here, but ever since the time the first Europeans arrived we've altered nature so much that we've become an exterminator species the third and most damaging wave of the people I call the future eaters."

Narration: Those first settlers to land in Australia and New Zealand, saw their role as taming an alien, and sometimes hostile environment - a 'new frontier'.

But there was a problem - someone had got here first - at least 40,000 years ago.

The Aborigines had developed a lifestyle so specialised, so in tune with Australia's demanding conditions, that the Europeans couldn't comprehend it.

Instead they convinced themselves that Australia was a terra nullius - an empty land, there for the taking.

In New Zealand, after decades of warfare and broken treaties, the Maori were finally subdued.

War and disease, so decimated the Aborigines and Maori - that it seemed they'd be part of the next wave of extinctions in Australasia.
For many Europeans, it was convenient and inevitable - a process of 'natural selection'.

And the lands themselves - despite their great age, they christened them the 'new lands'

New Zealand, New Caledonia, New Guinea and the great island continent of New Holland, later re-named Australia.

When Captain James Cook first saw this place, he described it as being like 'a gentleman's park'.

For the British, Cook's description brought to mind the richest and most fertile of lands. But in this vision of an 'Arcadia', they were badly deceived.

The land supported a rich diversity of extraordinary wildlife.

But in reality this diversity had evolved in one of the most nutrient-poor regions, on the planet.

Only creatures and plants that were highly energy-efficient, thrived here. Far from discovering a land of plenty, the colonists had set foot on some of the poorest soils in the world - but that wasn't all.

Flannery: "This land had another bitter lesson in stall for those who misunderstood it. As the explorers pushed inland they expected to find a living river system, an Amazon or a Mississippi but instead this is what they discovered a great river system indeed but one that only flowed once or twice a decade".

When it rains, water from distant storms flows down the dry creeks -releasing precious nutrients stored in their beds.

It can quickly become a flood - carrying massive volumes of water across the continent.

.

This is a time of plenty - a trigger for new life. Native fish, that have been trapped in the billabongs, can now travel to their breeding grounds.
Birds, like cormorants, gorge themselves in the rich waters.
Even the infertile soil, blooms with such an abundance of life - that the land can appear as rich as that of Europe

But drought, has always followed.

The native animals have evolved to survive with it - but it brought disaster to the 'new' arrivals.

Flannery:"The people that sat around this fire place dreamed of establishing a pastoral empire here at old Kanyaka. In the 19th century the son of an English aristocrat came out to this country during a good year and decided to sink the family fortune into the place. Pretty soon he'd built this village with 70 people living in it, but then in 1864 the inevitable drought hit and he had to walk away, he had to abandon his newly built English manor house, leaving the family dreams and their fortune in ruins"

Narration: Despite disasters like this, each good season saw more and more farmers move onto the land.
Government policy actually forced them to carry at least 4 times the density of sheep, as today.

The result was wholesale massacre of the native pastures - by hoof and jaw.

When the next drought came it brought catastrophe.
Erosion In this very spot in the Flinders Ranges, 40,000 sheep died in just one season.

Craig NixonFlinders Ranges National Park.

Nixon: "Those sheep didn't die of thirst they died of starvation, so basically they ate everything that was here er completely and utterly gone, er their hooves sort of pounded this soil into a powder er the first rains that came along and washed it all away, as a result we've got this gully erosion. Now that may have been ok, er the country may have survived with that given some more good years but hot on the heels of that 1880 drought came the rabbits."

It was bad enough that the new invaders overstocked the land - but they even brought their own pests with them.

Rabbits, foxes, and a whole menagerie of other European creatures.There were only two native predators, capable of holding back these introduced pests.

The wedge-tailed eagle, is a lethal hunter - it's one of the worlds largest raptors.

The other natural defender, was the dingo - it can even kill foxes and cats.
But their European traditions taught the farmers that these natural predators, were in fact, the pests.

They were systematically wiped out by bounty hunters.

Now, introduced species like the fox, rabbit and feral cat could spread unchallenged across the continent, in plague proportions - triggering a hundred years of ecological turmoil.
People herding rabbits in fence

Narration: Across the Tasman Sea in New Zealand, the colonists were repeating the same mistakes made in Australia - with devastating consequences for wildlife.
These fertile, temperate islands were more familiar to the Europeans than the unpredictable dry lands of Australia.
Track across misty forest

When the settlers first arrived, 60% was still ancient forests of kauri, beech, and podocarp - all of them singing with life - for this was a land of birds.
On the forest floor they found unique creatures, like the tuatara - a 200 million year old throwback to the prehistoric continent of Gondwana.

Tuatara

And the mouse-sized giant weta, the largest cricket in the world.

Giant Weta

Despite being hunted by the Maori, many flightless birds like the takahe, still survived.

With no ground-based, mammal carnivorous, life for this army of flightless foragers had been relatively easy. But not even the national bird, the kiwi, was safe from the impact of the latest human arrivals.

Flannery: "New Zealand's wildlife had evolved in isolation for something like 70 million years, and that meant that it was superbly adapted to the special conditions of New Zealand. But it came at a great cost for that same isolation meant that New plants and animals were extremely vulnerable to change"

Narration: As in Australia, the first settlers cleared the forests - triggering a cascade of environmental change.

On steeper slopes, the clearing and burning often led to erosion, and there was inevitable species loss.
Sheep on hilltop But the sheep and cattle flourished - generating one of the highest standards of living in the world.

Flush with the wealth from exports of meat and wool, the colonists set about building another England.
Horses and hounds hunt Recreational activities were imported from the 'old country'. But there was a severe shortage of creatures to hunt. So a huge variety of alien species was brought in, and set free. Rabbits proved to be the same ecological disaster, they were in Australia. Here too they quickly reached plague proportions.

In an attempt to control them, carnivorous mammals were introduced.
But the hundreds of ferrets, stoats and weasels, found it easier to hunt the native birds, especially the flightless ones - which were much less elusive than the fleet-footed rabbit.

As these mammal predators multiplied, their impact on the native birds became catastrophic. And soon another, even larger carnivore was to stalk the woods.

Thousands of feral cats, descendants of those first brought in as pets, went wild, and began to prey on the bird life of the islands, already under siege from rats, and other predators.

Not even the mountain grasslands and forests were safe from the new invaders. Red deer
Red deer, brought in to be hunted, quickly multiplied - becoming a national pest.
As well as overgrazing grasslands, they gorged themselves on the new growth in the native forests - turning the forest floor into a wasteland.

The only part of the native vegetation that seemed to be safe from the invasion, was the higher canopy of the forests. It's up here that many of the native birds feed and nest.

They also play a vital role in regenerating the forest. By eating the fruit and nectar they pollinate plants and distribute seeds in their droppings.

But by the 1930s it was noticed that the dense, green canopies of the native forests were changing colour, and dying.

The culprit was yet another introduced creature - the Australian brush-tailed possum.

This leaf-eating marsupial had been imported to establish a fur industry.

No-one imagined then, that it might threaten the very forests of New Zealand - or that it could be responsible for the disappearance of many native birds, like the kokako. After decades, infra-red cameras finally confirmed people's worst fears - the supposedly vegetarian possum, had been preying on the eggs and chicks of native birds, all along.

Soon the situation for the nation's forests and birds, was critical.

There were estimated to be around 70 million possums on the loose, devouring the equivalent of 140,000 football fields of native forest every day.

Flannery: "If I could have walked here 200 years ago, I would have seen a forest that was alive with the calls of thousands of birds. But ever since the Europeans have arrived this forest has been slowly silenced and most of the birds that lived here are now extinct. All of those pollinators of plants, dispersers of seeds and eaters of insect pests are gone. It's as if the fabric of the entire ecosystem has just been torn apart."

Narration: Australia's forests and grasslands were suffering from a different problem.

The Aboriginal system of managing the land through fire had gone - the Europeans had put an end to it.
This firestick farming, had played an important role, in sustaining the medium sized marsupials.

The rufus hare wallaby, is rarely sighted today - yet, just a century ago, it was one of Australia's most common animals.
Brush tailed bettong
The brush tailed bettong, was also widespread throughout the country.
And the bilby, would have been familiar, to all the Aboriginal people of inland Australia.
But now, all these animals, are teetering on the brink of extinction.
The demise of the marsupials has been silent and almost invisible. The only people who witnessed the process are the desert Aborigines.
And it happened, so recently - that elders like Nugget Dawson still remember hunting and eating these animals.

Nugget DawsonUluru-Kata Tjuta National Park

Nugget Dawson:"This is wayuta (possum) it runs around the treetops and calls out.
It used to live all over here.We were so familiar with these animals once, when we were children, and when those that have passed away were alive, we knew them all."

Nugget Dawson

Narration: Nugget lives near Uluru, a place where Aborigines have been given title to their land.
It's one of the few areas where traditional land management has been re-introduced - using firestick farming.

Nugget Dawson:"By burning we generate
fresh new growth,which is good feed for the kangaroo
and all these animals who loved to eat fresh green growth and fresh green grass. But because there isn't much burning any more they've all died out and all we get are these stuffed skins.
What are we to do?"

It's out here, in the arid zone, that the loss has been highest.

Scientists from South Australia are conducting a fauna survey, to discover the extent of the damage - and to see if the few survivors are still breeding.

They're working together with the Anangu Pitjantjara people, custodians of this land.

Frank:"We can see only one place now, where there's only few rock wallabies are now. "

Peter CopleyDept. of Environment and Natural Resources

Peter Copley:"There's one colony just in this area here and there's one other colony about 40 kilometre to the west here and that's all we've been able to find in the last 5 or 6 years working with Anangu."

Peter Copley

Flannery:"Well this is a beautiful little Waru, this rock wallaby is an endangered species today, yet when these fellas were young they were everywhere through this country, there's so many species of our marsupials that have suffered the same fate, 23 of them are extinct and this really is the last survivor among the middle size mammals in the whole of this region."

Tim Flannery and a Rock Wallaby

Narration: An important part of the study, is to document the knowledge of the traditional owners of the land - and to forge a partnership that will help to sustain the remaining wildlife.

The invaluable knowledge of the elders is being recorded, and shared - with the wider world.

Peter CopleyDept. of Environment and Natural Resources

Copley: "People have come away from a lot of their country and spent much more time away from it, as a consequence they haven't been doing hunting over as broader area of the country, haven't been using fire for a range of purposes and because of that the vegetation has got older post fire and then lightning strikes have taken out much, much broader areas of country than used to occur when traditional owners were on their country and burning in patches to provide a range of habitats for a big range of animals."

Flannery:"The kind of knowledge that's being shared here is extraordinarily complex and detailed and it's been built up over generations by these Aboriginal people, I guess it's the only way they've been able to survive in this extraordinarily harsh land, and we're in the middle of that process now, us Europeans are trying to adapt to this same kind of country for the long term, and the knowledge that's being shared there is probably our best guide as to how we can do that. After all these people are the only people who have ever lived here in the long term."

Narration: In New Zealand, the extinction crisis has gone much further than in Australia. By the 1970's it was realised that the nation was perilously close to losing, almost everything. Among many others on the brink of extinction, was the flightless night parrot - the Kakapo. Living in burrows had made it particularly vulnerable to feral predators.

Kakapo

Only 57 survive and most of them are male. Just one new female has been found in the last twenty years.
Kakapo on nest at night

The last male kakapo boom forlornly, all night, and every night, in a vain attempt to attract a mate, that will almost certainly never come.

It was vital to save not just the kakapo, but all the other remnant populations of native creatures that were left.

In many cases, they'd only survived on tiny offshore islands - protected from feral predators, by the ocean.
These islands were of enormous ecological importance - they were to become life boats for New Zealands wildlife.

Alycia Warren
Department of Conservation N.Z.

Warren: "We noticed that there were islands that had species remaining on them that were now no longer found on the mainland. But often one island just had one species on it. And by removing feral animals from islands we were able to bring a lot of extra species to them. So now we have quite a few islands that are lifeboats for animals that are native to New Zealand."

Alycia Warren

Narration: Over the last decade, the entire known population of Kakapo has been moved to island lifeboats.

It's hoped that here, in the absence of predators, the last of the night parrots will breed successfully.

But not all of the 700 offshore islands, were safe - the rat had already reached many of them, posing a severe threat.

Systematic poisoning campaigns were waged - and New Zealand quickly became a world leader, in controlling feral pests.
Something like 70 islands have now been cleared of these introduced mammals - paving the way for more and more ambitious species recovery programmes.

Flannery: "It's pretty clear that New Zealand will never be able to get rid of all its introduced predators, but maybe they can be controlled, especially here on the offshore island lifeboats, where some native species are down to just a handful of individuals , and they may be coming back from the brink, and if that's so it'll be an amazing conservation achievement."

Narration: The next stage of the 'lifeboats' programme, is to see whether principles developed on islands, can be used on the mainland.
Rotoiti National Park, in the mountains of the South Island, is home to another endangered parrot - the kaka.
Rotoiti was one of the first mainland 'life boats' to be established.

David ButlerDepartment of Conservation N.Z.

Butler: "This looks like an intact forest, we're in the national park here. And the key problems are the introduced pests found in these forests. So that's a wide range of mammals, both predators and herbivores, so we've got possums, rats, mice, stoats, probably a few feral cats. And then we've got pests people really aren't thinking of as pests, the wasp. We have large densities of common wasps in these forests and you'll see the honeydew that's on the bark of a number of the trees here, that provides a very high energy resource that allows wasps to build up large numbers in the summer."

Narration: Honeydew is a high-protein, sap-like liquid, exuded by an insect hidden inside the bark of trees.

It's a vitally important food - there's hardly a creature in the forest that doesn't depend on this energy source to some extent.

But 10 years ago, this vital life support system was disrupted, when another invader from Europe arrive here - the common wasp.

With no natural enemies, it was able to breed at will - filling the forests with it's constant buzzing.It also preyed in swarms, on the insects - another vital source of food for birds.

In 1995 it was realised that the breeding cycle of the kaka, had been disrupted. The wasps, were thought to be partly to blame. A wasp eradication programme began, using baits of poison cat food. Soon the baiting will be tried on a forest-wide basis.
But the other reason for the kakas decline, was the large number of mammal predators in the forest.

Alan SaundersDepartment of Conservation N.Z.Sanders: "Unlike true islands, these pest mammals can re-invade mainland islands easily. So really the big challenge at mainland island sites is to control that re-invasion rate of things like possums and rats and cats and stoats. And that's really the big challenge which we've yet to get fully under control."

Alan Saunders

Narration: The impact of feral predators was poignantly demonstrated, when the kaka finally began to breed again.One pair of birds did commence mating - an old male had been joined in the forest by a young female.

Two chicks were born to the pair, and monitoring of the nest site began. But sadly, it soon became apparent why the numbers of females had declined.

Before the chicks had fledged, the young kaka hen disappeared, and was tracked by radio to an old log. The guilty party was almost certainly a stoat. Hens on their nests are sitting targets, it explained the drastic decline in the numbers of female birds.
This year, close to Rotoiti Lake, the kaka have been breeding again, and now the nests have been protected on a forest-wide basis.

Stout

Ron MoorhouseDepartment of Conservation N.Z.

Moorhouse: "Yeah, so Tim, this is one of our protected trees here. You see the sheet of aluminium round the base, which is designed to prevent stoats climbing the tree. And the entrances up top and below that you can see a small patch of aluminium. That's where I've actually cut a hole to get access to the chicks."

Narration: Conservation field officers make regular checks on the nest sites - to ensure the chicks are being properly nurtured. It's a delicate operation, needing skilled hands.

Alan SaundersDepartment of Conservation N.Z.

Saunders: "What we've focussed on really in mainland island sites recently have been different suites of introduced mammals and so right here it's really those mammals, plus the wasps which are our focus. If we can control, effectively control those we'll really be starting to talk about real ecosystem restoration, at the mainland."

Ron MoorhouseDepartment of Conservation N.Z.

Moorhouse: To some degree we have to put the chicks in perspective a bit. A really important thing is that the female birds haven't been preyed on. They can always make more chicks, but if you lose those female birds you can't replace them. With many of our species extinction can be quite an insidious almost a surreptitious sort of thing. The animals are long-lived so they actually survive a long time so you get the impression that they're still around. And it's often maybe just a specific sex or age that's vulnerable to predation. So in the case of kaka it seems to be primarily female birds and the young that are vulnerable to perdition. So you can get the impression there's still a lot of kaka there, but actually that may be a heavily male-biased sex-ratio.
Flannery: What a bird, wow.

Flannery: "It's only recently that people have started to value New Zealands unique ecosystems. But the challenge to hang onto what's left is enormous. You just can't undo 800 years ecological damage in a decade, or even a century. But to make matters worse, the cascade of changes flowing through this forest now are so profound, they just have to result in many, many extinctions."

Narration: The battle to maintain New Zealands bio-diversity has only just begun.As the people of New Zealand fight to turn the extinction tide, Australians are still struggling to come to terms with the ecological damage, caused by previous generations.

Australia environmental crisis isn't just about disappearing wildlife - but the degradation of the land itself. And it's all because we, the third wave of future eaters, misunderstood this country from the very beginning.

The mistakes continued well into the 20th century. The scramble for wealth drove agriculture ever onwards - into the more and more marginal land.
This wasn't really farming in the sustainable sense, it was more like mining the soil.
The few nutrients that had sustained this ecosystem for thousands of years, were used up by just a few crops of wheat - and then the land was ruined.

Our rivers too came under attack. When it began in 1949, the Snowy Mountains Scheme was one of the engineering wonders of the world.
Australia was driven by a vision of becoming another America, a nation of hundreds of millions - feeding the world.
Controlling the unpredictable cycle of drought and flood, was thought to be the key.
Today so much of the Murray river's water is used for irrigation, that only a third of it's flow ever reaches the sea.

The Murray Darling system was the life line for over 30,000 wetland areas, that depended upon it's cycle of drought and flood. The rivers waters were once rich in native fish - but today the Murray cod, Australia's largest fresh water species, is already extinct in large tracts of the river.

Dead gum trees and carp
The wetlands ecosystems are dying - from either being permanently dry or constantly full of water, that drowns the majestic river red gums.
The powerful technology of the third wave of future eaters did eventually make the land yield. And Australians won a lucrative bounty from wool and wheat.
But the cost has been enormous. Once the native trees were cleared the water table rose, bringing salt to the surface - rendering the land useless.

And every time the drought returns, more and more of the precious topsoil is blown off the land. Millions of tons are lost to erosion every year.
In 1983, a dust storm enveloped Melbourne, plunging the city into twilight.
In just one afternoon Australia lost 4 million dollars in nutrients alone - blown away forever across the Tasman Sea.

The same winds that blow away the soil, fan the bushfires that rage on edge of our cities - plunging whole communities into crisis.
And these bushfires too are a man made catastrophe - the legacy of leaving the land unmanaged by the Aborigines - for the firestick was extinguished here over 200 years ago.

Flannery: "It looks to me like we're not in control here, in fact us Europeans never have been, because we still haven't learnt how to live with this country, we've tried to transplant a foreign heart into a different body and we're seeing all the signs of a massive rejection, and if we keep on trying to treat our country like this and keep on trying to ride it so hard we're going to kill it and that's what I mean by future eating. "

Narration: So far we've been making a living at the country's expense. But it doesn't have to be like this.
Branding Cattle

Now one in every 3 farmers, 24,000 of them belong to Landcare, they're committed to making a living here sustainably.

They're doing it by observing their country carefully - studying the fine detail of how it works.

Out here, on the edge of the Simpson desert - hard experience has taught graziers not to be greedy - to move their cattle on at the first sign of pasture degradation - for it's all too easy to overstock this land.
The artesian water here comes to the surface under great pressure.

At Dalkanina Station, Daryl Bell is actually using the water to minimise the impact of his cattle on the land.He pipes the underground water to storage tanks, placed in areas of good growth.
The water keeps the cattle in an area that can sustain them. At the first sign their food is being depleted - another tank is activated - and the cattle moved on - leaving the land to recover.

Daryl BellDulkanina Station, South Australia

Bell: "I think one of our major secrets in the whole lot is the invention of poly pipe and polythene tanks and fibre glass tanks you can move stock on little lots of water and they can sustain there for a long, long time left alone.
It's all the more remarkable because he's doing it in one of the driest places on earth that supports a pastoral industry."

Flannery: "I guess you must get a lot of people who come out here and look at this country and say gee it looks pretty hard I don't know how you do it. "

Bell: "Yes well I suppose well we are on the edge of a desert but er it's er very robust but at the same time very fragile, but it's more robust than a lot of people give it credit for, but you gotta be kind to it and it'll be kind to you, but you abuse it, it'll break ya. "

Daryl Bell

Narration: Much of Australia is rangelands, unsuitable for growing crops, but ideal for meat production.
Kangaroos and emus are the only large land animals that are perfectly adapted to this country.
Both have the potential to be harvested sustainably and profitably over vast areas of the continent - and they taste good too.

Flannery: "It's cost our environment nothing to produce this kangaroo steak, but the cost of making this loaf of bread has been enormous.. We loose 7 kilograms of irreplaceable soil for every kilogram of wheat we grow here, and it's no exaggeration to say that what we eat today will shape our country's future. We can either continue to eat at our country's expense or we can find ways to feed ourselves that's in tune with it's nature."

Narration: The salt-water crocodile has been here for at least 4 million years. Now in the Northern Territory, people are beginning to raise crocodiles for meat and skins - turning the tables from crocodiles eating us - to us eating them.
As Graham Webb argues, there's both a conservation and economic logic to farming and eating these creatures.

Graham WebbCrocodylus Park, Darwin

Webb: "It's just very simple, any animal or plant you want to look at. If it has a high value, either for skin, meat, or just because it's beautiful, people will look after it. If it has a low or a negative value, if it's eating your cattle or eating your sheep or something like that, then you pay money to get rid of it. If it has no tangible value then it's very easily replaced. And that's the problem with wildlife conservation on a global scale. People are frightened to put a value on. But if it doesn't have a value it's going to be replaced. "

Graham Webb

Narration: It's not just our wildlife that needs to be valued - water is the other great natural resource that we've been literally giving away.
It's been squandered to create enormous wealth for few - and until we put a true economic value on water, it will never be managed sustainably.
More than anything else, our future lies in how we manage this land.

Kakadu National Park is one of Australia's premier world heritage areas. It's complex ecology of wetlands, rainforest and grasslands, has been managed by the Aborigines alone - for the last 40,000 years.

Greg MilesKakadu National Park

Miles: "Aboriginal people have been burning this place for more generations than you can count. In fact much of what you see around in terms of the vegetation and the landscape has been sculpted by fire. It's a product of fire and it's necessary for us in partnership with the Aboriginal people to maintain that to maintain the status quo because if we don't, if we become shy of fire, the way people perhaps are in southern Australia we're going to have a pyrotechnic anarchy develop in this country which would probably result in really severe late season hot fires in the late dry season which are very destructive. "
Aborigine starts fire

Narration: Despite all that's happened to them, Aboriginal knowledge of how to manage this land with fire, has survived. Now it's being applied, using modern technology.
The traditional rubbing together of sticks, has been replaced by incendiary capsules - thrown from the air.
The idea is to burn on a controlled, but widespread basis, in order to prevent destructive hot bushfires triggered by lightning in the dry season - the firestick has been revived, on a grand scale.

Miles: "What we do is use technology to mimic what they used to do. So with the aid of satellite imagery, helicopters, incendiary capsules and a whole range of other things, quad motorbikes - you name it. We use all these high tech methods to achieve the same result that Aboriginal people got by doing it with banksia cones and walking on foot maybe fifty or hundred years ago right back into the far distant past. "

Narration: One thing is certain though, neither Australia nor New Zealand can build a sustainable future, without the support of their people.

A trip to one of the latest of New Zealands island lifeboats, shows just how far the public is behind this national conservation programme.
Just a few kilometres offshore from Auckland, lies the island of Tiritiri Matanga. It looks green now, but ten years ago it was barren, overgrazed pastureland, given over to goats.
Today, the island is almost entirely covered in forest again, and is being used as a lifeboat sanctuary for rare birds like the flightless takahe.
The transformation has been achieved mostly by volunteers - over a hundred or so of whom appear every weekend, joined by boatloads of children in their holidays. Over a hundred thousand native trees have already been planted.

If real results are to be achieved, and wastelands turned back into forest again, the wholesale support of communities is essential, on both a national and a local scale.
Eventually the new forest will grow to resemble this, the last relic of pristine forest left on the island - its canopy alive once again with the sound of native birds.

Flannery: "Well what an incredibly beautiful place, you can just hear the health of the ecosystem in all these birds that are mostly gone from New Zealand forests, and just 10 years ago most of this island was just pasture. I'm just amazed what people can do when the whole community works together pretty single mindedly to restore something like this."

Narration: In reality, it's all too easy for urban people, to forget about environmental problems - like species loss, and the degradation of soil and water.But, it's the cities where most people live and ultimately they will decide the future of this land. Urban people especially need to assess their life styles - and decide what kind of consumption levels are sustainable in these lands.

What level of population can be supported, and how much of our unique natural heritage can be retained. Each wave of human invaders into this region has changed its very nature, but eventually they've learnt to live sustainably in these fragile lands.

Except that is - for us, the third and final wave of the future eaters.

Flannery: "My people came ashore at this place just over 200 years ago, and ever since then they have been acting as if they never left Europe. Well the time has come now for us to become real Australasians, to learn to respect the uniqueness of these most fragile of lands and to live within their limits, and to let their rhythms, their richness and grandeur sit easily in our spirits."